Beat le mania sweeps America as fab four touchdown for tour
The entertainment world had never seen anything like it.
Hordes of young fans, mainly female, screamed in frenzied excitement at the very sight of them and queued outside record shops to snap up their latest hit singles.
Beatlemania had already swept Britain, with the Fab Four breaking records as well as making them thanks to their good looks, super-cool attitude and irreverent, witty interviews, not to mention catchy and expertly-crafted pop tunes.
February 7, 1964, however, saw interest in the band reach a new level as John Lennon, Paul Mccartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr arrived in New York at the start of their first tour of the US. As they stepped onto the tarmac at the city’s Kennedy Airport just after 1pm local time, the crowd of several thousand screaming teenagers erupted in ecstasy.
Many had dodged school or made an excuse to get out of work for the day. Placards bearing phrases such as I Love You and Please Stay were waved at the young band, and security was at a level usually reserved for visiting heads of state. Barriers were erected and patrolled and without these it’s probable the band would have been mobbed there and then at the airport.
The Beatles’ first appearance on American television was scheduled for the Ed Sullivan show two days later. There were 750 places available, a large number for a TV audience, but the tickets became the hottest in town with more than 5,000 fans applying to be part of TV history.
An estimated 73 million US TV viewers, about 40% of the country’s entire population, tuned in to watch. In the days when the internet wasn’t even on the horizon, news and coverage of such events usually travelled at a somewhat sedate pace.
That didn’t apply in this case, with a fever-pitched reaction on TV, radio and in the newspapers over the Beatles’ arrival. Their songs played on rotation on radio stations, almost continually pumping out in shops and workplaces.
Eager fans snapped up the latest memorabilia in the form of T-shirts, turtle-neck sweaters and tight-legged trousers, in order to show their dedication to the band. You could even buy a Beatles wig for about $3 if that was your thing. The Beatles always were a moneymaking phenomenon, as well as a musical one.
The band had notched their first UK hit in 1962 with Love Me Do and, by the time they landed in the States, had also scored massive successes with songs including She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand.
The fact that so many people can still hum the chorus to these compositions 57 years on speaks volumes about the legendary song-writing which underpinned the band’s success.
Their first public concert in the US followed on February 11 at the Coliseum in Washington DC before back-to-back gigs at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Two weeks after arriving in the States, the band departed for their return to the UK on February
22. But their first US visit, brief though it was, had left an indelible mark on the country’s cultural landscape.
The Liverpudlian band’s good-natured, yet rebellious, personalities were perfectly in step with the changes taking place in America and across the Western world which would see rigid postwar society transformed by the new ideas of the 1960s.